mell scrie:12.Speak about a person or personality you admire most. Give reasons for your choice.
"Hegel says somewhere that all the great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add : the first time as tragedy, the second as farce !" ( Karl Marx )
Introduction :
- the personality I admire most is the 20th century most likely candidate for elevation to the super league of scientific history;
- the personality I admire most designed the first practical program computer, which broke the German secret code, and changed the course of our history;
- the personality I admire most created a theoretical test for assessing whether machines possess intelligence or not;
Development :
ALAN TURING ( 1912-1954 )
- The Key Figure in the Development of Digital Computers
A. Turing's Posthumous Recognition : My Tertiary Attraction
- in every sphere of his life and work, Alan Turing made unexpected connections between apparently unrelated areas, and this thing characterizes me also;
- Turing's central contribution to science and philosophy was in the field of symbolic logic treated as a new brand of applied mathematics, giving it a physical and engineering content;
- Turing had a pivotal role in Second World War cryptology;
- he is considered the founder of the dominant technology of the 20th century;
- he was perceived as variously impressing, charming, and disturbing people with his unworldly innocence, and his dislike of moral or intellectual compromise;
- Turing's "so-called" suicide ( because there are many other suppositions ) was considered a result of medical treatment which was aimed to "CURE" his homosexuality, and which he was forced to undergo in order to evade a prison term;
B. Turing's Work : My Secondary Attraction
- Turing's remarkable and sudden debut was in an area where he was an unknown figure - that of mathematical logic;
- his first paper, "On Computable Numbers" ( 1936 ) was his first and perhaps greatest triumph;
- in this paper, he gave a definition of computation and an absolute limitation on what computation could achieve, which makes it the founding work of modern computer science;
- he made a unique logical contribution to the decryption of the Enigma ( the German enciphering machine ) and to the reading of the U-boat communications;
- combining his ideas from mathematical logics, his experience in cryptology, and some practical electronic knowledge, his ambition, at the end of the war in Europe, was to create an electronic computer in the full modern sense;
- Turing's motivations in this creation were scientific rather than industrial or commercial;
- in returning to the theoretical limitations of computation, Turing focussed on the comparison of the power of computation and the human brain;
- his credo was that the computer, when properly programmed, could rival the brain;
- his credo led to the foundation of the "Artificial Intelligence" program of the coming decades;
- his last famous work was "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" ( 1950 );
C. Turing's Mind : My Primary Attraction
- it is a pity Turing did not write more about his ethical philosophy and world outlook;
- as a student, he was an admirer of George Bernard Shaw;
- he used to share with his friends both the hilarities and the frustrations of his many difficult situations;
- apart from occasional comments in private letters, Turing wrote just one short story, which is about his 1952 crisis;
- his last two years of life were full of Shavian drama and Wildean irony;
- in one letter to his friend, Norman Routledge, he wrote : "Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines do not think !"
- Turing's above-mentioned syllogistic allusion to Socrates is unmistakable;
- and his demise, with "cyanide" rather than "hemlock" ( which was intended for Socrates ) may have signaled something similar;
- a parallel figure in World War Two, Robert Oppenheimer, lost his reputation during the same week that Turing died;
- both Turing and Oppenheimer combined the purest scientific work and the most effective application of science;
- Alan Turing was even more directly on the receiving end of science, when his sexual mind was treated as a machine against his protesting consciousness and will;
- but in the middle of all this human drama he left little to say about what he really thought of himself and his relationship to the world of human events;
Conclusion :
- the British prominent figure Alan Turing did not fit easily any of the intellectual movements of his time ( aesthetic, technocratic or Marxist );
- until the 1970s, the reality of Turing's life was unmentionable;
- but he exalted the science that the existentialists held to have had rubbed life of meaning;
- the most original figure of the 20th century, the most insistent on personal freedom, Turing held originality and will to be susceptible to mechanization;
- Turing's mind remains an ENIGMA !
- and it is this enigma that primarily attracted me most when I considered the personality I admire most to present for my English exam;
-